ENGL 190-01, Borderlands: Contemporary American and Canadian Fiction, Fall 2014

Abstract

This course is a study of contemporary American and Canadian fiction, much of it written in the realist mode and centered on the topic of trauma - psychological and physical, individual and familial - and on the emotions of shame, rage, and guilt. Many of these texts are autobiographical in form; several are autobiographical in content. The locales are, in the words of Russell Banks, "on both sides of the long, porous border between our two nations," and, as he observes of the psychic and geographical terrain of most of these works, "darkness comes early and stays late: summer is not a condition, it's an all-too-brief holiday. Cities are gray, skies are mauve or milky, and there are always wet boots slumped in doorways." Not all of these novels and short story collections have these locales, but, as a group of texts, they explore similar and interconnected themes.